by Karen Smythe
The velvet bag was now lying inside the open clay vessel, the plastic one inside it. When I looked at the velvet, I could taste whisky. In the seventies, when you opened the box of a certain brand of whisky — Crown Royal, I think it was — the bottle inside was in a smooth purple sleeve of the same colour. My parents kept one on hand for their bridge and cocktail parties, nights when Gina and I would hide in the rec room with the TV volume turned up high to block out the sound of women’s laughter.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to empty the bags’ contents unless I could do it without looking. So I rolled a square piece of clay and laid it on the top of the bowl, leaving a two-inch opening — enough room for me to reach in with my thumb and forefinger and work the velvet sack free. I pulled it out, empty, and put it back in the wooden box from the funeral home.
I reached in again. When my fingers found the plastic sack, I pulled just enough of it through the narrow opening to slice off a corner. I pinched another corner of the bag and spun it around, shaking the ashes into the bowl.
But “ashes” is not the right word. We don’t burn into flakes that could fly away in a breeze, like ashes from parchment or fire wood. What I am keeping of James is pulverized bone, skeletal gravel.
A silver-grey residue as fine and as soft as baby powder clung to the plastic. I had an urge to touch it. I put my hand inside and drew my index finger across the dust. There was no smell. It tasted like water, like air. Like nothing.
***
Starlings. Those birds, dancing across the sky, they were starlings. And they were murmurating. That is the word that describes those particular actions. I don’t know where I got that word from, but I’m sure it is right.
***
To keep the walls of a clay container from sagging as they dry, the pressure inside of it must be kept constant. So I punctured a hole in the side of the closed bowl with a steak knife and brought the vessel to my mouth, blowing air into it the way you would a balloon. The cool, firm clay was soft as flesh against my lips. I stayed there and held my breath until it hurt. When the tension of the wall was solid enough to withstand my palm pushing against it, I pinched off the blow hole with my lip-covered teeth, kissing it shut.
twenty one
The nursing home held its standard memorial. The visiting chaplain called Lou “Les,” and spoke for ten minutes about life and death and angels and heaven. Afterward, some of Lou’s hall-mates shook my hand. “He was a good man,” one woman said, nodding as if I had asked her to weigh in.
Was he? Would James have said Lou was a good man? I don’t think so, but I am not sure. Lou was certainly good to me. He was good to Didi, and maybe he was good to the lady who spoke to me. Perhaps that’s all we can ever say about the people in our lives — how they were, with each of us.
***
I kept the half sphere covered with wet cheesecloth in the fridge until I made a similar-sized bowl out of the rest of the raw clay body. With the tines of a fork, I scored the rim of the new bowl and the perimeter of the flat lid on the other bowl, then slathered the gouges with fresh slip. Placing the new piece upside down on the old, I twisted it back and forth, as if reaming an orange. I pushed the sloppy clots bleeding from the centre seam back into the narrow crevice and wrapped a hand-rolled worm of clay around the equator to seal the join, smudging it with a wet sponge until it was reabsorbed and disappeared.
***
Anna arrived this afternoon for another visit. We’ve grown closer these past few months. She’s needed me again, and her company has been good for me. She will be going to university next year; Gina wants her to apply to U of T, but Anna doesn’t want to stay in the city. She wants some space between herself and her parents, she says. I tell her she is smart to know that, and smarter yet to act on it.
“Mom says if I go, I’ll be abandoning her like Dad did.”
“Your mother will survive.” And she will. My sister is nothing if not a survivor. “She’ll get over it. I’ll remind her how badly she wanted to get away from our parents, when she was your age.”
“She can’t stand being alone at all now, and she follows David around the house all the time. He’s already started going to Dad’s every weekend. It will only get worse for him when I leave.”
“Anna, you’re such a good person.” I hugged her, and she held me too, for a few moments. “But you’re not responsible for the happiness of other people. Not your brother’s, not your mother’s, not mine. Only your own. Don’t let anyone convince you that you’re being selfish.”
“It’s one of Mom’s favourite words,” Anna said, and we both laughed. “Your mother,” I said, “is a real character.”
After Anna left, I called Gina and left a message. “It’s me,” I said. “I just want to tell you that you did an amazing job, raising that daughter of yours. I mean that, Gina. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that to you before. Anyway, I’m here. Call me.”
Gina and Ben. Her need had exceeded his. Why do humans withdraw from others who show a need for them? Simone Weil asked this question. Her answer: “Gravity.”
***
To make the opening through which my ashes will be poured, I carved a small square into the top convex wall of the globe. I was careful to angle my knife’s approach; the outer edge of the lid had to be wider than the inner, to keep it from falling in. When I pulled the paring knife back out and saw still-wet clay smeared on the blade, I thought of the dissections we did in biology labs, and how peeling back the peritoneum in those pickled baby pigs made me want to throw up.
With the knife tip, I lifted the cut-out just enough to get a purchase on it with my fingers, and gently removed it. It had to retain its exact curved shape while it dried or it wouldn’t fit in place later, so I used a paperweight I found in a box in the basement — one of those clear domes with colourful acrylic swirls captured inside, an imitation of expensive Venetian glass, that had belonged to my mother — to rest it on.
Washing dried clay from my hands at the end of the day, I glance into the egg holder by the sink and see my wedding ring. I wonder if Anna will want it as a memento one day. My mother’s wedding ring was buried with her, as was her wish, and Gina was disappointed. “What did Mom think,” she said when Dad read us the will, “she’d need gold for the afterlife, like King Tut?” I can see Mom’s ring mixed up among the broken necklaces, single earrings, and hair clips sitting on top of Gina’s messy bedroom dresser. The band would have been lost eventually, had Gina gotten it. Gina or Anna or maybe Anna’s children would lose track of it, and by then there would be no living person who knew what that ring had meant to any of us.
***
In our back yard a few days later, I found a small branch that had broken off the old maple tree. The twig I snapped was the right thickness to use as a tool for decorating the urn. Its pith was like the bristles of a stiff, ragged paintbrush, and as I dragged it up and around the curved, leather-hardened clay, it made faint cursive-like lines. The bark at its edge gouged deeper marks into the pot when it made contact with the clay.
No pattern — I didn’t want symmetrical shapes or suggestions of any recognizable image, like a leaf. Just random scoring, etchings and dips. I used my double-jointed ring fingers, which failed me on the potter’s wheel, to add the odd depression, dimples barely noticeable unless you traced your fingertips lightly over the surface with your eyes closed.
The markings remind me of the variegated lines for rivers on an old spinning globe, the kind that sat on every father’s desk in those wood-paneled suburban rec rooms of the sixties and seventies: pale green, pink, purple, and orange countries with cobalt oceans and cerulean lakes made the planet look both beautiful and ugly. It felt good to hold the whole world in your hands, while being able to pinpoint exactly where on earth you belonged.
I’ll let the vessel air dry to a bone-white finish. I’ve decided not to fire it. The extreme heat of a kiln gives clay the permanence of a fossil, and that’s not the way I envision this story e
nding, for James and me.
I pressed an imperfect, oval pebble of clay onto the lid of the orb, and then peaked it with a pinch. Anna’s thumb and forefinger will fit there, one day, I thought, imagining her lifting the lid from this crypt to fill the top half with my ashes. She’ll need instructions. I’ll put a folded piece of paper inside the top of the urn, once I’ve decided where James and I should be set down and left to the elements.
twenty two
Sometimes when I can’t sleep I reach for the clay globe, and in the morning I wake up on my side with its hardness pressed against my flat chest, an arm underneath, cradling it there.
The bed is flat and smooth and null. I miss the swale James’s body made next to me in the mattress. It has forgotten his shape.
***
Healing hurts. You want it to. Because you keep touching it, don’t you? The way you touch your tongue to a canker, to feel the sting. You probe it to summon the pain, to exacerbate it. If you can make it worse, perhaps you can make it better.
***
I used to think all true love would feel the same, but I was mistaken. I misread my marriage, my husband. Myself. My love for James was of a different order than what I felt for Ted, and different again from what I gave to Josh; but it was true, as true as I could make it. It wasn’t enough, perhaps, but I couldn’t help that. I could not have loved James any more or any differently than I did.
I think I was wrong, too, about all of the selves we create throughout our lives, about the discreteness of the self-in-love. Even that self is an accretion, not a circumscribed, calcified entity. Time does not chop us into bits, or undo us piece by piece; each self is not separated from all the others, like a photograph in a frame, encased and preserved when ardour or life ends.
No. Time paints us in layers, I think. We are composed, built on top of a charcoal sketch; the oils comprising one likeness influence the shade, the texture, the shape of the next. Each portrait is entirely new and fresh, yet inseparable from the one underneath. To see what lies beneath the surface requires a careful, almost surgical peeling back. Or maybe a slicing, a cross-sectioning would be better. That would reveal everything in an instant: the whole gamut of human want and need, of love and betrayal and sorrow and happiness.
There was lots and lots of happiness, James. Squads of it. That’s what you gave me, my love. Because I did love you, you know that I did. I vowed it, and it was true.
***
This is what I know: it wasn’t a fear that ill health could take me from James that got to him. And it wasn’t a fear of his own death, either, that pushed him into that airless space where he huddled. But it did have something to do with my diagnosis — I was right about that. Because James fell apart, and I didn’t. That was the key: I didn’t. And in those moments when we confronted the fact of my illness for the first time, James imagined a life alone but saw me standing in a particular spot — over there, in the place where I knew I’d be fine, whatever happened. I’d be fine without breasts, or with a serious illness. I’d be fine with a shortened life, or a life without a partner. Without him. Because this is what I missed: James had seen something hard in me — something heavy, like a refusal that would not be moved.
***
“Mom is cracking up. I think it would have been easier if Dad had died, instead of divorcing her,” Anna said, her wet, webbed, mascara-coated lashes sticking together. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “You can tell me whatever you want. It’s just us here, honey.”
“Mom says life is ninety-five per cent crap, and five per cent joy.”
Oh, Gina. “It feels that way sometimes,” I said, “but you get through it. Happiness is something you have to make for yourself.” Anna quickly glanced up to read my face. I know I didn’t radiate happiness in that moment, but I was trying. “I really miss Uncle James,” she said.
“I know. Do you remember how much he loved to play badminton with you in our back yard when you were little?” Anna nodded, but she was looking at the clay sphere behind me, on the shelf. “What’s that?”
I hugged her before saying I’d made the urn for Uncle James and me, and that it will work like a garden-kit after I’m gone. She was puzzled. “Uncle James is waiting in there, on standby.” She was now uncomfortable. “And eventually —”
“Don’t say it, Aunt Mazz!” Anna covered her ears and closed her eyes and hummed like a child blocking out a scolding.
“Eventually,” I continued, “it will hold me, too. And one day both of us will go back into the earth. The clay will break down. What’s inside will break down and be absorbed, too.” I raised my voice. “On and on it goes.” She wasn’t listening. I almost yelled at her, but I didn’t.
It will be years, I thought, decades, before she’ll know what I’m talking about.
Anna opened her eyes. We were silent for a while. Then, abruptly, she smiled. We both started to laugh, and I couldn’t hold back how much I loved her then. My love for Anna flowed out of me like an estuary, and the flood of it kept coming and coming, and it carried with it my feelings for James, too — and I couldn’t stop crying with the joy of it, the sad, saturated, bloody joy that loving people forces into your heart.
twenty three
Light streamed through the open blinds in the living room. Dust coated the coffee table, the windowsills, the bookshelves; I hadn’t cleaned the place in weeks. What time is it? I wondered. I was still wearing my pajamas. I hadn’t slept well, but I’d slept late, and my sense of time was skewed. Was it late morning or early afternoon? There were too many hours in the day, and they were all the same. Where did I put James’s watch?
Nothing felt right. I picked up the urn, I don’t know why, and wandered into the darkness of the bedroom, its curtains closed tight. I could have been in one of my recurring dreams. I could have been levitating, hovering above the ground.
The urn grew heavy. I went through the kitchen, out the back door, onto the patio. I walked through a dune of snow. Ice glittered the diamond mesh of the neighbour’s chain-link fence. My stockinged feet took me to the ancient maple in the corner.
The urn became lighter. I raised it high and it blocked out the sun.
What would James want? I closed my eyes. Where would he want us to be? I didn’t know. Would he want to be mixed with me? I shivered, but not from the cold. The urn was weightless now.
I almost let it go.
***
I put the urn in the passenger seat, wrapped the seat belt around it, and drove to the farm. It wasn’t my farm now, but it never had been. The sale was quick and final; everything would be demolished come spring. Yet I felt I had the right to trespass.
I walked toward the long white mound of James’s creation, the clay globe cupped in my hands. I moved like someone who knew what to do, and why. When I came to the wall, I felt James with me; I paused, and then he was gone. No, not gone — he was up ahead now, and I was following, slowly.
I watched him grow smaller and smaller, and then, before he reached the far tree-line, my husband stopped. James stopped and for a moment I saw him there, standing whole against the wild, wide sky.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been a long time coming and many people have had a hand in making it happen, both directly and through a kind of magical, osmotic influence. My gratitude first goes to my mentor, Diane Schoemperlen, for her expert guidance while I was writing the first draft of This Side of Sad, and for her ongoing friendship. Thanks, too, to Antanas Sileika at Humber College for encouraging me to aim high. Stephanie Sinclair, my agent, believed in my book and its potential, and I greatly appreciate her commitment to my work and her efforts on its behalf.
It has been my great fortune to work with Bethany Gibson, who is an exceptional, insightful, and intuitive editor. Her support for and work on this novel inspired and energized me to make it better and better. A kindred spirit, Bethany is someone I’m sure I was
destined to meet. And thanks to Peter Norman, who copy-edited the book, for his astute suggestions and careful readings, which made the process a pleasure for me.
My appreciation goes to many writer and professional friends, old and new, who have been supportive along the way: Lynn Henry, Joan Givner, Stan Dragland, Adam Lewis Schroeder, Miriam Toews, Ian Colford, Dawn Promislow, Danila Botha, Mark D. Dunn, David Doucette, Kasia Jaronczyk, the late Tish Pacey (Thornton) Bird, and the late Gwendolyn MacEwen. My deepest gratitude goes to Donald Hair, Professor Emeritus at Western University, who was the first to read my earliest work; he made me believe I could be a writer, and thus myself — a gift for which no words of appreciation will ever suffice.
Thanks, too, to close friends who stood by me and my writing at critical crossroads: Jan Richardson, Janis Rosen, Denna Benn, Susan J. Carlyle, Janet Helder, Mary Wyness, Michael Groden, Parrish Balm, Marco Balestrin, Sarah Hechavarria, Nancy Gruver Van Wagoner, Lydia Makrides, Maria Parrella-Ilaria, Mala Darshanand, and the late Karin Prior.
Gratitude galore goes to my parents, Margaret Ann Smythe and Dr. Clifford Smythe, for engendering a love of reading, writing, and learning in me — and for their continuing certainty that I can accomplish whatever I set my mind to. To Gretchen Betts, mother-in-law extraordinaire and writing-shed landlord, I also owe much.
And finally, boundless thanks go to my husband, G. This book could not have been written were it not for his constant support, understanding, patience, and encouragement, not to mention his brilliant wit, curiosity, and creativity — a mighty mix indeed.
Author photo: John Wills Photography
Karen Smythe is the author of Stubborn Bones, a collection of stories, and Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy, a work of literary criticism. She lives in Guelph, Ontario. This Side of Sad is her first novel.